February 7, 2023

Spotter app: Keep track of scan history and collaborate with your team

WORDS BY   Sara Platiše

POSTED IN    Steampunk Spotter


Steampunk Spotter is an Ansible Playbook writing tool that enables you to check your playbooks via CLI tool or integrations, to achieve reliable automation you can trust. An important part of this tool is the Steampunk Spotter app, where you can track the results of all your scans, collaborate with your team and check the quality of public git repositories. Addressing pain points and finding potential solutions is much faster, easier, and most importantly – more transparent.

A functional, intuitive dashboard you will love to use

Steampunk Spotter app offers a dashboard where you can keep up with your scan history, frequency of failed playbook executions, most common errors, and your progress over time. As a playbook developer, by tracking and overviewing data of your successful and failed playbooks runs, you can become better at it with time. And if you find yourself in a business role where you could benefit from simply overviewing this data, but are not necessarily running the playbooks yourself, then this tool will undoubtedly be extremely beneficial for your business needs.  

Use the projects feature to neatly organise your scans

A default project with your personal organisation is assigned to you upon logging into the Spotter app. It is where your scan data goes by default, but you can always create new, empty projects. They serve as containers to separate your content. How you organise your projects is completely up to you; every project comes with an ID that you can use in the CLI or integrations to organise your scans. 

Check the quality of public git repositories

Spotter app has another great benefit: you can check the quality of public git repositories in it. How? When creating a new project, you can also choose the git repository box that creates a new project from your repository scan by pasting your git repository URL into the form. The scan starts automatically.

Analyze and overview your scan history

Scans of empty projects are initiated from the CLI, git repository scans directly from the app, but no matter where you scan, even if you use integrations (GitLab, GitHub, and VS Code), the data can be viewed in the Spotter app. Once your content is scanned, you can look through all the warnings, errors, and hints the tool provides you with. Much of the given feedback, such as the use of FQCNs (fully qualified collection names) and generating a requirements file with the correct collection requirement version, can be resolved automatically with the rewrite function available in the CLI tool. For more complex issues, links to module documentation of a specific version are included. 

Collaborate with teams more efficiently to speed up automation processes

Ease of use, structure, readability, and collaboration are at the forefront of our thoughts, when it comes to efficient playbook writing. By inviting other users to your organisation in the Spotter app, you can cultivate a shared workspace where you can track progress and data on shared projects, with your own team and other teams as well. Collaboration within the app brings diverse types of users and teams in the automation chain closer together. If you understand how and when the automation is run, you can focus more on delivering the results you want to achieve.   

We hope to show you that not only can Steampunk Spotter drastically speed up your automation process; it can also help bridge the gap in knowledge of collaborating teams. Do not take our word for it, try it out for yourself. We are confident you will love the Steampunk Spotter app just as much as we do.